A digital workplace strategy sets out how your employees use technology to access information, complete tasks, and develop their skills. It connects your software decisions to business goals, with clear responsibilities for implementation and ongoing improvement. To build yours, review your existing systems, define your objectives, create a phased plan, choose the right tools, and measure progress. Bringing communications, training, and processes together can help you reduce administration and maintain consistent standards across locations.
If your employees have to search several systems to find a policy or ask a colleague which document is current, everyday tasks take longer than they should. Across multiple departments and locations, those delays can affect onboarding, customer service, and the way teams follow your procedures.
It's easy to see how this happens. HR needs a learning platform, operations needs a way to manage requests, and individual teams adopt their own communication tools. Over time, information becomes spread across systems that weren't chosen with the wider organization in mind.
A digital workplace strategy helps you address this. It gives you a plan for how your people will access information and work together, including which tools you need and how you'll manage them.
It also helps you prepare for AI. If you're introducing an assistant to answer employee questions, you need to know which content it can access, who keeps that content current, and how permissions will protect sensitive information.
In this guide, we'll explain what a digital workplace strategy covers, the questions to answer before you start, and five steps to build your own. We'll also show how Claromentis Enablement Hub supports that strategy by bringing operations, training, and compliance into one platform.
A digital workplace strategy is a plan for the technology and working practices your employees use to do their jobs. It defines how systems connect, where information is stored, who manages it, and how employees will be supported to use it.
Your strategy should cover four areas:
These decisions need input from the teams using the systems as well as those managing them. A platform may meet your technical requirements but still be difficult for a shift worker to access or a new employee to navigate.
An IT strategy covers technology investment, architecture, security, and service delivery. A digital workplace strategy overlaps with those areas, with a particular focus on the employee experience and daily work.
Digital transformation is broader. It can include changes to customer services, products, and business models, alongside internal operations. Your digital workplace strategy can support that wider program or address employee needs as a project in its own right.
An intranet is one of the tools you might use to deliver the strategy. The strategy determines its purpose, the content it holds, and how it fits with your other systems.
Research shows how difficult it can be for employees to manage the volume of information reaching them. Microsoft's 2025 Breaking Down the Infinite Workday report found that 48% of employees and 52% of leaders described their work as chaotic and fragmented. Among the 20% of Microsoft 365 users receiving the most pings, meetings, emails, and chats interrupted core working hours roughly every two minutes.
The tools employees use also deserve attention. A Gartner survey of 5,141 employees found that 23% of digital workers were completely satisfied with their work applications in 2024, down from 30% in 2022. Those satisfied with their applications were nearly three times as likely to report being much more productive.
AI adds further decisions about training, information access, and management support. In its 2026 Work Trend Index, Microsoft found that organizational factors, including culture and manager support, had a stronger association with reported AI benefits than individual mindset and behavior. Only 26% of AI users surveyed said their leadership was clearly and consistently aligned on AI.
For your organization, reviewing the digital workplace means looking at how these issues affect daily work. Consider where employees lose time, which information they struggle to find, and what support they need to use new tools effectively.
Choose specific outcomes you can measure. Depending on your priorities, these might include reducing onboarding time, increasing policy acknowledgment rates, or helping site managers find procedures more quickly.
Record your current performance and agree on a realistic target with the team responsible. For example, if onboarding takes three weeks, identify which delays you could address through better access to training and information. This gives you a way to assess progress after launch.
Your finance team, field engineers, and site managers may need different information and ways to access it. Speak to representatives from each group about the tasks they complete, the devices they use, and the problems they encounter.
For organizations with multiple locations, include employees working away from head office early in the process. Check whether they can access company updates during their shifts and find the guidance relevant to their role. Use those findings to prioritize improvements across the workforce.
Review what each department uses and how information moves between systems. Look for duplicated documents, repeated data entry, and tools with overlapping functions.
You may be able to meet some requirements through software you already own. Where you need a replacement, understanding the current setup will help you assess integration, migration, and training requirements before committing to a purchase.
Include training and ongoing support in your plan from the outset. Employees should understand where to find information, how to complete common tasks, and who to contact when they need help.
Give teams an opportunity to test the platform before launch. Recruit local advocates who can answer questions and share feedback, and schedule further training when features or processes change. Managers should also use the agreed channels consistently for their own updates and requests.
Check the vendor's support hours, response commitments, escalation process, and arrangements for urgent issues. These should match your working hours and the importance of the processes you intend to run on the platform.
If your teams operate across time zones or outside standard office hours, establish what help will be available during those periods. Internally, assign responsibility for reporting issues and keeping employees informed.
Create an inventory of the systems in use, including their owners, costs, renewal dates, and usage levels. Compare the licenses you pay for with the number of people actively using each application, and investigate low usage before deciding what to retain.
Review the quality of your information as well. Can employees find the current version of a policy? Does your document management system provide version control? Are access permissions appropriate, and does every important document have someone responsible for keeping it current?
Finally, identify processes that depend on email, spreadsheets, or repeated manual updates. Ask the people involved where delays and errors occur. Their answers will help you identify the most useful improvements.
Set out what you want the digital workplace to achieve and connect each objective to a business priority. Faster onboarding might support expansion into new locations. Better policy tracking could help your compliance team identify missing acknowledgments and follow up sooner.
For each objective, record the current position, your target, and how you'll measure it. Assign a sponsor who can make decisions and help resolve competing priorities between departments.
Keep the objectives specific enough to guide purchasing and implementation. When you assess a feature or proposed change, you should be able to explain which objective it supports.
Break the work into manageable phases, with a named owner, deliverables, and dates for each. Include content reviews, data migration, permissions, integrations, testing, and employee training alongside the technical setup.
Prioritize changes according to employee needs, business value, and dependencies. For example, reviewing and organizing your policies may need to happen before introducing AI search or mandatory acknowledgments.
Start with a defined group or process where you can test the approach. Use feedback from that first phase to improve the experience before extending it to other teams and locations.
Assess software against the requirements you've identified. Ask vendors to demonstrate the tasks your employees will complete, including how those tasks work for different roles and locations.
Look for opportunities to bring related activities together. Managing policies, training, and workflows in one platform can reduce duplicated administration and make records easier to access. Review the full cost of your options, including implementation, support, integrations, and ongoing maintenance.
Specialist systems may still be necessary. Where you retain them, define which system owns each record and how information will be kept consistent. Plan how employees will move between tools and which access arrangements they will need.
After launch, compare performance with your starting measurements. Review usage by team and location alongside the outcomes you set out to improve, such as onboarding time, process completion times, and training completion rates.
Search data and employee feedback can help explain the results. Repeated unsuccessful searches may point to missing content or unfamiliar terminology. Low usage in a particular location may indicate an access problem or a need for further training.
For important updates, track acknowledgment as part of your communication process. Emergency Physicians of the Rockies uses mandatory reads across its seven emergency department sites to record staff acknowledgment of key information. Its mobile app also gives field workers access to current resources.
Assign responsibility for reviewing these findings and acting on them. Your strategy will need to adapt as the organization grows, processes change, and employees identify new requirements.
With clear ownership and the right systems in place, your strategy can support improvements in several areas:
The benefits will depend on your starting point and priorities. The customer examples below show how bringing related activities together can address specific operational problems.
Travcorp Holdings, the travel group behind brands including Holiday Gems and Destination2, previously used email, Teams channels, SharePoint libraries, and separate platforms for policies, training, and events.
Employees had to move between tools to find information, while remote colleagues struggled to connect with the wider organization.
Claromentis Enablement Hub gave Travcorp a central platform for communications, operations, and training. Its case study reports faster onboarding through a sales learning pathway that combines policies and courses, improved employee recognition, and easier policy distribution across its brands.
Winkworth needed to support communication and collaboration alongside training across its estate agency network. Its previous learning platform didn't meet those wider requirements.
Using our intranet and LMS, Winkworth created a branded portal for company news, learning, and shared resources. Permissions allow franchisees to manage their own users and content areas, while head office retains visibility across the network.
The portal gives employees access to communications, knowledge, and training in one place across more than 100 offices.
Claromentis Enablement Hub brings operations, training, and compliance together for complex organizations. You can choose one, two, or all three of its core platforms to suit your requirements:
Additional capabilities support the way you manage information and monitor progress:
For organizations managing operations across multiple sites, these capabilities help head office distribute guidance, support local teams, and follow up on required actions. Your people can access the resources they need, while managers have the records to monitor progress.
Start with the tasks your employees need to complete and the problems that make those tasks difficult. Use that understanding to set priorities, select suitable tools, and plan how you'll support each team through the changes.
Keep reviewing the results after launch. Clear ownership, current information, and employee feedback will help you improve the digital workplace as your organization develops.
To explore how Claromentis Enablement Hub could support your strategy, book a discussion call with one of our experts.